On Thursday night, the second part of the “Twitter Files,” which revealed Twitter’s “secret blacklists,” was released.
Elon Musk, a billionaire businessman, promised to make records public shortly after he took control of Twitter. These documents would demonstrate how, while the company was owned by someone else, Twitter suppressed free speech. The “Twitter Files” is the name given to these records.
Two independent reporters, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss received access to the material. The first part, which featured data pertaining to Twitter’s repression of the Hunter Biden laptop affair, was published by Taibbi on Twitter on December 2.
Weiss stated that entire teams of Twitter staffers created their own blacklists in order to limit and “shadow ban” the reach of specific accounts in the opening tweets of “THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.”
Some people mistakenly believe that shadowbanning is the act of stifling a user here or a user there for a variety of reasons. However, Twitter was acting far worse. This wasn’t a little business.
There are lists, or “blacklists,” of entire groups of people who Twitter has deemed unworthy of being followed. Liberal ex-New York Times reporter Weiss also claims that politics played a role in at least some of the operation.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford, was one of these blacklisted individuals.
Weiss claims that Bhattacharya stated that COVID lockdowns were seriously harmful to young children and that this was entirely accurate.
The professor was thus included to a “Trends Blacklist,” which limited the audience for his tweets. In essence, Bhattacharya was never able to become popular.
Weiss also disclosed that Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, had been added to a “Do Not Amplify” blacklist, as well as conservative talk show host Dan Bongino.
Weiss provided a photo of Twitter’s internal reporting framework. Employees could select from a variety of censorship options for each account. The labels “Recent Abuse Strike” and “Trends Blacklist” were applied to Bhattacharya’s account.
The labels “NSFW View,” “Strike Count,” “Notifications Spike,” and “Search Blacklist” were applied to Bongino’s account.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
More on this story via The Western Journal:
This all flies in the face of previous comments made by top Twitter executives denying that any such blacklistings, such as shadow banning, had ever taken place.
According to Weiss, internally at Twitter, the practice of shadow banning (reducing users’ visibility unknowingly) was known as “Visibility Filtering.”
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one former employee told Weiss and Taibbi. CONTINUE READING…